'Local Responses to Global Challenges in Southeast Asia — A Transregional Studies Reader' is a collection of multidisciplinary essays, predominantly derived from papers presented at EuroSEAS 2019, the leading academic conference on Southeast Asian Studies, hosted by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. It brings together a variety of scholars from Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, allowing for multiple flows and directionalities of knowledge productions and exchanges, be it between the Global South and North as well as within the Global South. The reader presents empirically-oriented, theoretically grounded analyses of local responses to global challenges such as knowledge-productions; notions and practices of building diverse communities; neo-populisms and contentious politics; resources and sustainability; urbanization; labor, livelihoods and mobilities. Each section starts with an introduction reviewing the state of the art. Authors will take cue from a transregional perspective understood as a distinct and alternative perspective on multi-lingual and transcultural spaces of contact, exchange and transfer. This includes a contextualization of phenomena in terms of diverse (cross) linkages and entanglements, including motilities on different scales, i.e. ranging from the local, regional to national and/or global levels. Container-based notions of place and space are addressed in a critical manner, where space and area are understood as notions beyond established systems of ordering and meta-geographies. A key goal is to allow for a consistent conceptual advancement of New Area Studies, which are critical, decentred, decolonial, diversified, and multi-disciplinary in nature.

Pakistan at Seventy-Five investigates the countrys multi-layered issues in the context of a post-colonial polity marked by diversity, heterogeneity, stratification and volatility. This wide-ranging discourse engages with diverse formal and informal actors as markers of identity, historical events and social conditions, as well as global geo-political and neo-colonial centreperiphery relations that shape narratives about the nation and the constructions of a sense of belonging. The editors and contributors utilise multi-faceted and multi-layered approaches, focusing on (1) identities, and questions of diversity and pluralism; (2) horizontal and vertical technologies and geographies of power related to questions of trust, legitimacy, participation, and governance; and (3) the distribution, deprivation and vulnerability of sociocultural, political, and human resources. Studying Pakistan has been subject to different approaches, including decolonial, indigenous, and feminist perspectives. This volume draws out alternative epistemological and methodological viewpoints: the insideroutsider conundrum, centreperiphery asymmetries, hegemonic discourses, and practices within Pakistans national/international academy. The chapter contributions are the outcome of a unique interdisciplinary research cooperation at Quaid-i-Azam University, focussing on early career researchers. Presenting a multiplicity of voices and trajectories, Pakistan at Seventy-Five provides new input to existing debates and directions for future scholarly endeavour.

Why is the classical social democratic vision of development based on social justice by democratic means losing ground? Why was it so difficult to renew, even in the context of the third wave of democracy in the South? How does this matter in the North too, and how might it be reinvented? This accessible book brings to life major insights gained through written sources and interviews with a large range of activists and political protagonists in the southern cases of Indonesia, India, and the Philippines – but also in the northern social democratic stronghold of Sweden. By considering the experiences in view of the basics of Social Democracy and a broader comparative framework, Olle Törnquist arrives at globally relevant conclusions. Crucially, Törnquist also puts forward suggestions for how to achieve this reinvention social democracy. Through implementation of broad alliances in the Global South, supported by the Global North, for transformative rights and welfare reforms – universal, participatory and impartially implemented - precursors to social economic growth pacts can thus be effected.

This edited volume is an open access title and assembles both the historical consciousness and transformation of the MENA region in various disciplinary and topical facets. At the same time, it aims to go beyond the MENA region, contributing to critical debates on area studies while pointing out transregional and cultural references in a broad and comparative manner.

This book contains the most comprehensive and critical account available of the evolution of The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) norms and the viability of the ASEAN way of conflict management.

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state. Furthermore, Spruyt examines the encounter between these non-European systems and the West. Contrary to unidirectional descriptions of the encounter, these non-Westphalian polities creatively adapted to Western principles of organization and international conduct. By illuminating the encounter of the West and these Eurasian polities, this book serves to question the popular wisdom of modernity, wherein the Western nation-state is perceived as the desired norm, to be replicated in other polities.